Amok and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

could see her naked body through her dress …from that moment on I lived for nothing but the idea of taking her, forcing a groan from her hard lips, feeling this cold, arrogant woman a prey to desire like anyone else, as that other man had done, the man I didn’t know. That … that’s what I wanted to explain to you. Low as I had sunk, I had never before thought of exploiting such a situation as a doctor … and this time it wasn’t desire, the rutting instinct, nothing sexual, I swear it wasn’t, I can vouch for it … just a wish to break her pride, dominate her as a man. I think I told you that I have always been susceptible to proud and apparently cold women … and add to that the fact that I had lived here for seven years without sleeping with a white woman, and had met with no resistance … for the girls here, twittering, fragile little creatures who tremble with awe if a white man, a ‘master’ takes them … they efface themselves in humility, they’re always available, always at your service with their soft, gurgling laughter, but that submissive, slavish attitude in itself spoils the pleasure. So can you understand the shattering effect on me when a woman full of pride and hostility suddenly came along, reserved in every fibre of her being, glittering with mystery and at the same time carrying the burden of an earlier passion? When such a woman boldly enters the cage of a man like me, a lonely, starved, isolated brute of a man … well, that’s what I wanted to tell you, just so that you’ll understand the rest, what happened next. So, full of some kind of wicked greed, poisoned by the thought of her stripped naked, sensuous, submitting, I pulled myself together with pretended indifference. I said coolly, ‘Twelve thousand guilders? No, I won’t do it for that.’
    She looked at me, turning a little pale. She probably sensed already that my refusal was not a matter of avarice, but she said, ‘Then what do you want?’
    I was not putting up with her cool tone any more. ‘Let’s show our hands, shall we? I am not a tradesman … I’m not the poor apothecary in Romeo and Juliet who sells his poison for ‘corrupted gold’. Perhaps I’m the opposite of a tradesman … you won’t get what you want by those means.’
    ‘So you won’t do it?’
    ‘Not for money.’
    All was very still between us for a second. So still that for the first time I heard her breathing.
    ‘What else can you want, then?’
    Now I could control myself no longer. ‘First, I want you to stop … stop speaking to me as if I were a tradesman and address me like a human being. And when you need help, I don’t want you to … to come straight out with your shameful offer of money, but to ask me … ask me to help you as one human being to another. I am not just a doctor , I don’t spend all my time in consultations … I spend some of it in other ways too, and perhaps you have come at such a time.’
    She says nothing for a moment, and then her lip curls very slightly, trembles, and she says quickly, ‘Then if I were to ask you … would you do it?’
    ‘You’re trying to drive a bargain again—you won’t ask me unless I promise first. You must ask me first—then I will give you an answer.’
    She tosses her head like a defiant horse, and looks angrily at me.
    ‘No, I will not ask you. I’d rather go to my ruin!’
    At that anger seized upon me, red, senseless anger.
    ‘Then if you won’t ask, I will make my own demand. I don’t think I have to put it crudely—you know what I want from you. And then—then I will help you.’
    She stared at me for a moment. Then—oh, I can’t, I can’t tell you how terrible it was—then her features froze and she … she suddenly laughed , she laughed at me with unspeakable contempt in her face, contempt that was scattered all over me … and at the same time intoxicated me. That derisive laughter was like a sudden explosion, breaking out so abruptly and with such monstrous